True Crime Stories

The last blog that I did involved a woman who was a member of the LAPD from the early 1980's until her arrest in 2009. It had brought my attention, or should we say, reminded me about the time period in which Daryl Gates had been the chief of police in Los Angeles. As long as you were alive and old enough to remember, you cannot forget the era of the Rodney King beating and how the acquittal of the officers involved sparked what was called the “L.A. Riots.” Then again if you were alive in the 1960's it was the second time that you had seen such activity in Los Angeles as the “Watts Riots” occurred in 1965. Sadly the core of both those incidents was the same... racism among the LAPD. And, while issues of racism seemed to plaque the department for many decades, that was far from their only issues. Daryl Gates joined the LAPD in 1949 after serving time in the military during World War II. He started out as the chauffeur to then chief, William Parker. Parker ...

This case took place in the Los Angeles area during what is basically known as the Daryl Gates era. Daryl Gates was the chief of police for the LAPD from 1978 to 1992. I will have to write another blog at some point just going through that era to fully explain what this means. I attempted to do that here and found myself on a tangent that lasted several pages and I still had not mentioned Stephanie Lazarus or the crime she was convicted of committing. With that said let me just sum up the Gates era as being one in which the officers of LAPD were encouraged to engage in police brutality and have little to do with members of the general community. Gates was known for his racist and arrogant comments and personality and it was said encouraged the officers under him to do the same. The Blue Code of Silence was likely never more prominent than it was during this era. It is this code that many people believe allowed Stephanie Lazarus to nearly get away with murder. It sh...

In the last few months there has been a lot of talk about authorities solving cold cases with the help of genealogy websites. There is a group out there that has been able to take the DNA results of people who have entered them into genealogy sites in hopes of finding relatives and either matching them, or doing what they call “reverse” trees and comparing them to unknown DNA tests in cold cases. One just recently happened here in Indiana where I live and when they went to the man's home he readily confessed to the crime. One day I will be blogging about that case, but today it is about John Heath, who was convicted twenty-eight years after his wife disappeared, not by one of these methods, but simply by chance. If the new owners of property once owned by Heath had not been renovating AND decided to open a hatch in the floor of an old dairy barn the body of Elizabeth Heath would have likely never been found. DNA was not even tested in this case as experts claimed tha...

This is one of the cases that I am actually surprised that I have not blogged about before. It is a crime that happened in my state and the perpetrator was sentenced to death so every few years his case seems to be back in the news. It is also a case that irritates me just a tiny bit. I have often stated that I am neither an advocate nor an opponent of the death penalty. But, I also find it ridiculous all of the inmates that remain on death row when a state has not executed anyone in several years nor do they look to have plans to do so any time soon. While Corcoran was sentenced long before the last execution took place in Indiana in 2009, three people went on death row in 2013. As of 2018 there are no scheduled executions planned in the state despite there being eleven death row inmates. Three of those inmates, including Debra Brown who is held in Ohio for the crimes she committed with Alton Coleman, were sentenced before Joseph Corcoran. And, to be fair one of t...

Unlike most of the cases that I blog about here this is not a murder case, but it is only by pure luck that it is not. The defendant in this case, Irving Galarza, was charged and convicted of attempted murder when he hired people to set fire to the home next door to him. Obviously this is one of the many crimes that was not fully thought through. Recently I posted a case that was featured on the show Fear Thy Neighbor, one of my favorite show on Investigation Discovery, but I also posted about a lot of misinformation given on that particular episode. The episode about this case may not have had a whole lot that was technically misinformation or things changed for dramatics, but there were some things left out. One of the main things involved the fact that the episode portrayed Irving Galarza as a single man when in fact he was married (or at least had a companion living with him) and two children. I feel this is important because in reality aside from the woman i...